President of Motorola Slams iPhone Prices as ‘Outrageous’

In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Jony Ive criticised Motorola’s “Moto Maker” service, which lets users personally customize a Moto X smartphone, calling it a way to reduce the role of the designer. Today, Rick Osterloh, the president of Motorola, has hit back at Apple’s design guru, slamming the iPhone’s prices, CNBC reports. “Consumers are after affordable phones and the outrageous prices that Apple charges are not the future”, he said.

“Our belief is that the end-user should be directly involved in the process of designing products,” Osterloh told the BBC on Wednesday. “We’re making the entire product line accessible. And frankly, we’re taking a directly opposite approach to them (Apple).”

“We do see a real dichotomy in this marketplace, where you’ve got people like Apple making so much money and charging such outrageous prices. We think that’s not the future,” the Motorola president said.

Osterloh also said that a great smartphone and a great mobile internet experience, shouldn’t be an expensive luxury. “It should be a simple choice for everyone”. He highlighted that an 16GB iPhone 6 costs $749, while Motorola’s higher-end Moto X starts only at $399.

…says the representative of a company that used to charge $1000 for the first flip phone.

John Wolf

Can’t afford it? Don’t buy it.

Bert

He’s probably a closet iPhone user.

Rancwr

No, just honest.

Rancwr

Hardly relevant. My first computer cost over $2k and had a fraction of the power and memory of a Nintendo DS. Does that mean no one can ever complain about the price of a computer again because they used to charge 4 times what they do now?

Al

That’s a valid point. I can appreciate that most new technology of any sort can have a high initial price tag. And phones certainly applies. I just found it amusing nine the less.

Incidentally, your example of computers is one of the few things that doesn’t apply. When looking at capabilities at the time a configuration is brought to market, computer prices have remained the same since the Commodore. If anything, they have increased in price (speaking in relative terms of how well a computer can run a given program “then” and now).